Originally posted by Nutty I see what you're getting at, but its not valid anymore. _ALL_ future games will have their shaders tinkered with by a much more complex compiler than we currently have. This will be true for all IHV's. Not just the ones that balls up their hardware. Putting a patch out that deliberately circumvents these optimizations is wrong.

If the driver shader compiler was "inflating" 3dmark scores (correctly & fairly) then a new patch shouldn't lower scores.

If you look at a history of 3dmark scores with NVIDIA drivers, I think the obvious answer is that the application specific optimization in the drivers is still ocurring and the shader compiler is not responsible for their performance in any meaningful way. The scores have been quite static all along, build 330 lowering certain drivers notwithstanding.